


Head Full of Hurts

by Port



Category: Without a Trace
Genre: Amnesia, Captivity, Concussions, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-22
Updated: 2006-11-22
Packaged: 2018-03-05 08:10:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3112457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Port/pseuds/Port
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Martin and Danny, in the cellar, with amnesia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Head Full of Hurts

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to carina84 for the beta!

—turned from the sickbed, for that was what it was, the child slack and unresponsive, bedside table and grey walls a blur as he swung around to see what had made Danny yell and only saw Danny fall, not even sticking out a hand to brace himself before he hit the floor. Martin didn't waste time, but the quarters were close and his gun still in its holster. His hands had fumbled halfway to it when he glanced up to see a hard black shape in front of his face, and that was it.

~~~

He had never woken up, but he knew he had been asleep by the feel of broadening awareness and his prone, horizontal position. For the longest time, he had been beset by cold all over his body and pain that sliced through his head, and all he had done was lie there. It didn't occur to him there was anything else to do or to feel, and he didn't wonder why the ground hurt him so, nor even why he lay there in the first place. 

When he did finally move, it relieved the strain on muscles he had not realized were taut, and the relief nauseated him. Blood's flowing again, he thought. Oh, God.

He retched as much as he could without actually throwing up. Something inside prevented him from doing so. A protective sense, though protection from what he didn't know. Who needed that much pride?

Dried liquid flaked away from his eyelids when he rubbed them. Not morning sand. Blood. He could smell it.

The light, what light there was, filtered in from a section of the ceiling in thin, weak bands that softened when they hit the floor. Didn't tell him much. He already knew the floor was unevenly hewn stone, jagged in places, crumbling in others, dusty. Firm like a foundation. Here and there a ray showed him a wooden shelf, some jars, a few tin boxes. Stored food, he guessed. Some kind of cellar?

After what seemed like a very long time—part of it impossible to remember, telling him he may have passed out and woken up again—he used crags in the wall as handholds and stood up. He had a moment of vertigo in the darkness, unable to know how tall he really was, how far away was the floor, and would he fall through it headfirst and float forever in this black space.

The moment passed right away and he felt disgusted with himself for his fancy. Just a little dizziness. 

Under the square section of ceiling where the light strained into the cellar, he got his bearings, felt more solid, remembered to breathe. It actually felt kind of good to get a good lungful—

—until he heard someone moan. It hadn't come from above; it had echoed off the walls to the left, past where he had woken up. He stared into the darkness, and a second moan, more like a whimper, escaped from the chamber. 

Someone's here, he thought, and went to see who it was, not bothering to inspect the light source. One look had told him all he needed to know. Wooden slats: warped, wooden boards too high to reach with his hands, bright light above them, no chance of an exit.

Hand over hand, he felt his way along the wall to where the noise came from, until his foot hit something solid with a little give. Flesh. A body. This time an outright whimper, and he knelt carefully, feeling around for an impression of this person in here with him.

In seconds, his hands had traced over smooth fabric much like he himself wore, a jacket, a tie, and then warm, moist skin, a neck. His hands continued across a chin (narrow, he thought) and along the sides of a face rough with new beard growth, up to ears (the left one quite slick) and above those a hairline, a full head of hair that he found vague comfort in sliding his hands through two or three times. In the back, at the neck, his hand came away with that warm slickness he had encountered at the left ear. Smelled like blood. Quite a bit of it, dry in places too.

The man started to weep when he touched the soft wound at the back of his head. His movements had been automatic up to this point, but when the man began to cry, he wondered what he was doing, what he should be doing, how to make the man better.

"Shh, shh," he said, moving his hands to the man's shoulders. "You're going to be okay."

But the weeping continued. He understood it, felt a little like going into hysterics himself. His own skull felt like a steel vise around his brain, and he thought if it tightened any more the pain would disable him. The constant pressure of it…. Somewhere, long ago, someone had felt like this and then created the word "agony." And this man was worse off. Way more blood, still no true consciousness.

"Stop," he whispered, knowing the man was beyond understanding. Head trauma, he thought. This guy doesn't know where he is.

That was all for some time. He sat with his legs folded and listened to the man cry, mind blank. He may have passed out again, though the agony in his skull never paused, never skipped or faded out and then in, never gave him the briefest relief. Later, though, he realized that the man had gone silent, and that gave him something to do.

His hand went for the man's neck and found it warm, the pulse fast. Next, he leaned over and put his ear to the man's mouth, listening for and hearing steady respiration. The lucky bastard had passed out. Not a good sign, but still. At least he was no longer in pain.

Focusing seemed to make the agony both more and less intense. More when he thought about the pain, and less when he was distracted from it. So he tried to think of anything else he could do. Where was he, anyway?

In the dark. In a hole someone had carved into hard ground. Deep, too. A cellar for preserves by the looks of the shelves near the light. The boards over the entrance probably were part of a trap door, unless some other door existed down the way in the dark, past where he had found the weeping man. It might be a good idea to look, to find someone to describe all this pain to. And there it was, more intense again, now that he thought of it. Like being stabbed through the ear.

It took longer to stand this time, and he wondered how much time had passed between deciding to look around and actually getting to it. Over toward the light, he could see a wall, rough and white-colored, like chalk, seeming to glow in the contrast between darkness and light. He could tell that was an aftereffect of the agony, skewing his vision. But at least it only gave him one direction to explore now. Making sure not to step on or kick the man, he took hold of the wall and followed it as far as it went.

He had envisioned a set of stairs at the end of the tunnel, leading to a cellar door and from there maybe a dim evening, the sun just set, because brighter light would hurt his eyes. He would emerge into a grassy yard, because nobody who scraped out a cellar like this lived in an apartment building in the city. The fresh air would revive him a little, the unenclosed space would relieve the pressure crushing his mind, and he would, yes, sit down, just for a minute, and rest.

This time he remembered waking up, as well as going to sleep. It was still dark, and he was at the end of the tunnel. Here, the ceiling sloped down to meet the floor at an acute angle, tapering the space into a narrow crevice just large enough for him to reach his hand into. Clearly, as much as anything was clear, this place had a single entrance and exit, and that was several feet higher than he could reach, at the other end of the space, maybe ten yards away.

On his way back to the man, he made himself walk carefully, so as not to step on him or trip over him. When his foot met soft resistance, he knelt down and felt around. He found a pulse again, and the warmth of the man's skin made him realize how cold it was down here, made him wonder if his own extremities were receiving enough blood. The question made him anxious as nothing so far had. But that subsided immediately, when the man gasped and jerked under his hands.

Next thing he knew, he was helping the man turn over and holding him by the ribs as he vomited all over the floor. In the darkness, the sound of it was pretty disgusting, but he figured the experience of it had to be worse than the sound, so he simply held on and made supportive comments. You'll be all right. Let it go. You're doing fine, pal. Just hang in there.

"Oh," the man groaned, finished at last. He pulled the man up to a sitting position, away from the vicinity of the mess, and the man folded over to rest his face in his arms, close to his lap. "Oh, God."

"Hello?" he asked.

But the man only groaned again and rolled onto his side.

"Are you okay?" he asked. "What's your name?"

"Hm?"

"I asked you your name. Who are you? Do you feel better?"

Long moments passed. Long enough for him to note the sound of his own voice, quite different from the way he sounded in his mind. Louder, but soft around the edges, as if in uncomfortable deference to whomever he was speaking to.

Finally, the man spoke, said something in speech so slurred as to be incomprehensible. It might also have been in another language.

"Sorry, I didn't hear you." He spoke softly, next to the man's ear. "What's your name?"

"Martin?"

The man still slurred, but this time he made it out. "Martin? That's your name?"

"Martin."

After that, the man—Martin—fell asleep again. Maybe he would wake up feeling better; wasn't vomiting supposed to help in that area? He thought of a best-case scenario, Martin waking up and helping him find a way out of here, but immediately discarded it. Better to depend on the worst case taking place: Martin's head wound would be fatal without medical attention, and the man would die down here, apart from his family, alone in the dark with a stranger.

He had to do something.

Calling for help did not seem rational. The nature of the hole indicated that someone had closed them in, though he couldn't imagine why. His head hurt too much to consider things like _why_ , not together with the practical question of _how_. How to get out. There was only up, through the floorboards, and nothing to climb so he could reach them.

A few feet away, Martin's breath evened out. He didn't know if that was a good sign. It sounded tense and even in the dark, then slowed a bit more. Then more.

With more determination than strength, he stood and stumbled to the shelves. Made of sturdy, unvarnished wood, they did not appear to be attached to the wall or floor. In the thin light from above, he judged them to be about a foot higher than he himself stood. Each shelf was loaded with canned or bottled preserves. Getting them all down was going to hurt.

He was right about that. Constantly bending down and standing back up brought back the vertigo from before, so he had to stop frequently and brace himself against a wall. Halfway through, he took off his suit jacket, used it to cover Martin. He unbuttoned his shirt halfway too, felt better when the cool air touched his skin, less nauseated by the smell of his own sweat and the vomit several yards away. The shelves gradually cleared, though, bottle by bottle and can by can. Martin continued to breathe. It was good. He found himself working past the pain and dizziness, so caught up that he didn't realize Martin had regained consciousness.

" _Callete_ ," Martin hissed. "Oh, God."

He put down the bottle in his hand and went to check on Martin. "How do you feel?"

Martin curled his shoulders toward his stomach and raised his hands over his head. "Quiet. Just, be quiet, Jesus."

He had barely whispered the question, but it didn't take a lot of imagination to understand how much even a little noise could hurt. Come to think of it, he hadn't been too careful about stacking those cans and bottles on the floor, either. The clanking must have woken Martin up, yet he couldn't quite regret that, not when he remembered how Martin's breathing had slowed down.

"Sorry," he whispered as quietly as possible. "I'm working on getting us out of here."

"Water?"

It was such a simple, miserable request, almost childlike in its tone, that he found himself looking around for some water before realizing there wasn't any. Not on the shelves, nowhere in the hole. He hung his head.

"I'm sorry; there is none."

Martin grunted and held himself tighter.

"I'm so sor—" he said, and then cut himself off when Martin's right hand snaked out and gripped his forearm. Martin's hand worked its way down to his wrist by touch, and squeezed.

"'S okay," Martin rasped.

He swallowed. "Yeah."

~~

In the end, they were two men beset by debilitating head injuries in a rough-walled space carved under some floorboards. He tried to climb the shelves to reach the wooden slats, but the shelving fell on its side after he pushed it into position. The crash made Martin whimper, and he himself covered his own ears as the echo reverberated in the darkness. He couldn't lift the shelf and angle it back to stand upright, so he gave up on the idea and sat down next to Martin.

"So much for Plan A," he said, still speaking in a low voice.

"Martin. Martin?"

It had long since become apparent that Martin was not the man's name. He called it, obviously expecting a man named Martin to answer, but who knew where the guy was, what he was doing while this man lay in the dark.

He still called him Martin, though, for lack of anything else to call him. He had considered making up a name, but they were both confused enough as it was.

"What is it?" he asked, only half-expecting an answer. Martin had been in and out of lucidity since waking up. He couldn't tell if he was getting worse. All he knew was that the back of Martin's head had felt spongy on that first inspection, and that they had been down here forever. "Tell me what you want Martin know."

"What I want him to know?" Such a small voice. Yeah, in case you die and I survive, he thought, hating himself. But there had to be something he could do for Martin, even if passing on a message was all there was.

"I'll pass it along," he said. It wasn't instinct that made him reach for Martin's hand, but there was something vital in the way he felt when Martin squeezed and held on.

"Where is he?"

"I don't know. We'll find him."

"Need him. Him and a doctor. Martin."

He had to laugh, even though the poor man was slipping away, unable to hang on to the thread of conversation. "I'm sorry, man."

"Hurts."

"I know. Try to rest."

An angry sob, then silence. They breathed together and the rest was darkness. 

~~~

Things became apparent, one by one.

A great creaking sound.

Scuffling, as of many footsteps.

Yellow flashlight beams, crisscrossing each other and dividing the darkness.

Here! Get the paramedics!

White light across his eyes, blinding him.

Martin? You awake, kid?

Jack had never called him kid before, but he kind of liked the way it sounded. His dad had never called him anything like it either. He had enough left in him to hope he hadn't said a word of what he'd just thought.

After that, it was mainly discomfort. He thought someone was moving him, but he couldn't be sure. His body felt far away, distant enough to leave behind. For a while, he did.

~~~

Martin never did recall the time he spent in a World War II era food cellar with Danny. When the doctors asked, he told them honestly that the last thing he remembered was Friday last week, getting off from work on a rainy evening with plans to buy some groceries and rent a movie before going home for the weekend. Next thing he knew, he had a private room in the hospital and an almost unbearable headache.

When he asked about Danny, they told him he was in the ICU, recovering from brain surgery. Martin took it calmly. He felt his eyes grow huge, but he only nodded, as if to say, Of course he is. Why wouldn't he be?

"I'm his next of kin," he told them.

"We know," they said, avoiding his eyes. Then they explained the nature of Danny's injuries, the fact that his brain had impacted forward and then back inside his skull, resulting in damage on two sides. There was also the matter of a small network of fractures on the back of his head. Someone had used a blunt object to hit him there, providing the force needed to make his brain ricochet inside his skull. The surgery had gone as well as it could, but it was too soon to tell how Danny would be when he woke up. They warned him about changes in personality, cognition, emotion, memory, motor control and speech, but he hardly heard anything after that except for something vague about the benefits of a range of therapies.

"When can I see him?"

Soon as he recovers from surgery, they said. If you rest, we'll take you to see him.

Martin fingered the bandages wound around his head and agreed to rest. It wasn't too hard, knowing Danny would be there, in some capacity.

He never told anyone about the time he spent away from his body, after they found him and Danny in that cellar.

~~~

He floats above himself for a while, watches without concern as people climb up and down an old ladder: paramedics, Jack, Vivian. It soon becomes dull, and he wanders away, up through the ceiling of their prison and into a basement, where a lot more people mill around. Cops and FBI agents and more emergency medical technicians. In one corner, an elderly man with burly arms in handcuffs sits on a bench, tears in his eyes. Two cops stand in front of him, asking questions.

"My grandson is sick. I had to protect him. Now you'll take him away."

You dragged those men down there yourself? a cop asks.

"My wife told me to do it. She's sick as well, been to a lot of doctors. She knows not to trust them. Never trust a badge or a doctor. We keep our heads down."

That little boy is dying! the cop yells. Martin wishes they'd let the man be. Can't they tell he isn't right in the head?

"Don't trust 'em. Don't trust 'em. We have aspirin. It's enough."

Martin leaves the man rocking and goes upstairs. On the ground floor, through the windows, police lights flashing and yellow tape. It is too familiar to hold his interest, so he goes up two stories, looking for the room he knows is there. Everything is incorporeal, transparent when he looks hard enough. The past is a dream, but one he remembers, as if he has just woken up from it.

Drab place, but well-lit by half a dozen decorative lamps to accommodate yet more EMTs and a few cops. Rent-controlled. It has a neat, lived-in look, Sixties-era furniture, vacuumed carpet, framed family photos all over the walls and every flat surface. Dried orchids arranged beneath a snapshot photo of a young woman in her twenties, holding a baby. The place looks as it had when he and Danny had visited, following a report filed by the boy's Head Start program. 

"When we called to ask about his absences, they told us they couldn't find him, but they hadn't called the police." The administrator on the phone had given Martin the grandparents' address, had pressed him for reassurance. "We called CPS too, but they don't have a file on the family and I don't want Sean to slip between the cracks. His grandfather sounded strange. Kind of panicked."

"We'll do our best," Martin had said.

They hadn't, but he feels okay about that. In fact, he feels no pain at all, and it is such a relief, he hopes he can stay like this forever, floating just below the ceiling.

In the sickroom, for that was what it had become at some point, an EMT holds an oxygen mask over Sean's mouth and nose. The little boy waves to Martin from his perch above a lampshade, and Martin waves back. The room has a soft, orange glow about it, and when Martin leaves, it is with a warm feeling.

He drifts downstairs, where he finds a stretcher being carried from the basement. The man on it wears a thick turban of white bandages, stained red. Martin hovers above him and looks on with an awed curiosity, the way a child might look at some strange creature at the zoo, mouth open, peering sideways. He knows this guy, _recognizes_ him from a thousand dreams, but when he floats closer, the man doesn't respond. Danny stares sightlessly ahead, pupils blown under heavy lids.

They carry Danny to an ambulance and shut the doors. Its red lights turn on. Martin looks up, and for the first time sees the stars twinkling above the skyscrapers. All of them, crowding each other out, more than he has ever seen at one time, even in the country. The ambulance wails as it starts away, and Martin says, "Wait," and that is all he knows until he wakes up in the hospital, his head full of hurts.

**End.**


End file.
